Re: [Vim-latex-devel] Completion of Tcommands

[Srinath A. <sr...@fa...>]

A bit more discussion...

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Luc Hermitte wrote:
> - Why
>     exec 'silent! 0r! '.g:Tex_CatCmd.' '.a:filename
>   and not just:
>     if fileexists(a:filename)
>       exec 'silent! 0r '.a:filename
>     endif
>   ?
>   It would reduce the problems we can experience because of external
>   programs -- another source of headaches.

I tried doing :r {fname} before but found that it actually creates a new
buffer in the process. I think that creating unused buffers is a greater
evil than spawning a shell command. If you notice, I take a lot of care
to only create one temporary buffer in a session. Also r! {fname} seems
to spawn the shell in the background in gvim, so its not too
intrusive... I submitted a feature request about a function
filecontents() in vim which would basically return a <NL> seperated
string of the contents of a file, but I have a feeling its going to be
neglected like always. Sometimes I really wish viml had a few more basic
building blocks.

> - Why
>     if search(a:regexp, 'w')
>       let retVal = 1
>     else
>       let retVal = 0
>     endif
>   instead of:
>       let reVal = search(a:regexp, 'w') > 0
>   ?
>   I'm a militant for the direct use of boolean expressions whenever we
>   have "if expression then a=true else a=false endif" :)
>
Heh :) I guess it does make things more compact. I would go so far as to
say that I should have simply done:

let retVal = search(..., ...)

I have only rarely used booleans in places other than if statements
etc... But I guess logical expressions are not really consistent across
languages. For example, in vim:

echo 2 && 3

prints 1

whereas in python (which is becoming my favorite language),

print 2 and 3

will print 3 (which seems more logical actually as far as expression
short-circuiting goes... for example, you could do

something = istrue and file.readlines()

will make something contain the contents of the file if istrue is true,
a sort of if then statement.
)

So whats correct? Depending on return values from boolean algebra might
lead to inconsistencies, so be warned.

BTW, Luc: how did you get the logic for what steps to follow to generate
the DVI file correctly? I notice that TKMakeDVI first runs bibtex if
file.aux contains \bibdata even before running latex. But this seems to
be incorrect in situations where the modification is to remove
a bibliographic entry... i.e, if initially the file contained

\bibliography{fname}

and I removed this line or changed fname and then did TKMakeDVI, then it
would wrongly make bibtex scan fname... I hope you see the problem.

Thanks,
Srinath